Aplha Centauri 2 Wishlist

[Chaos Theory]

I'd be interested in an overhauled inefficiency model, as it doesn't seem quite right that my base 32 tiles from my HQ but connected with mag tubes in the post-orbital game loses half its energy even if I have a paradigm economy.

No hard cap on specialists should be necessary. You are right in that the supply crawler facilitates all-specialist bases, but I also can't imagine each farmer only feeding nine other people in the year 2200 (condensor-farm-enricher on a nutrient bonus plus satellites). Automated crawlers make perfect sense, but effectively manufacturing citizens is very powerful.

[Hercules]

I would like to see tunnelling (my apologies to those who have mentioned this in a wish list before) an option at some stage, maybe at Ecol Enginnering. Effectively the same as roads but also like submarine but below ground. This could be accomplished in a number of ways:

A former acquires tunnelling ability. A former builds the tunnel rather like building roads and magtubes. Non naval Units would travel along these in the same way as on the land surface. All tunnels would all be at the same subterranean level.

A unit itself acquires tunnelling ability, like cloaked or wave.

In all instances there would be one move to go underground and one move to surface or maybe not.

To partially counter tunnels; there would of course be counter tunnels but there could also be ground sonar devices. A ground sonar attribute would only cover maybe 2 squares in one direction. north, south, east or west not all four. It should be possible to build 2 or more ground sonars on the one tile, but maybe good spacing would cover the invasive options.

The underground sonars may also trigger defence capabilities.

Breaking into an enemy tunnel should give benefits, like knowing the route of the tunnel to source or knowing what units are in the tunnel and/or where they are.

[Hercules]

However maybe only limited type of weapons should be allowed underground:

Attack weapons up to say Gatling or explosives (new) or long range power via artillery, like a very short range missile and/or maybe a bio weapon (not really keen on this).

Also aircraft could launch a tunnel buster, that is, a bomb
(like the fungal missile) that destroys/blocks the tunnel in a prescribed number of tiles.

[Senethro]

Now thats really getting complicated. I think that bridges as a sort of road you build on water would get all the worthwhile effects of tunnels.

[GeoModder]

I would love the possibility to settle more planets and/or moons in the Alpha Centauri system. Granted that most extraplanetary colonies wouldn't be more then outposts, but they could increase minerals and energy income of a faction, and perhaps even special laboratories.

And changing the 'map' of a planet/moon at the same time to a proper spherical one!

[Ka Plewy]

Fights and moving through the polar regions would be fabulous.
I'd also like to change naval combat to move from a purely hex system to a zone based system.
Naval combat is all about finding the opponent, and during the course of a turn, realistically, a ship should be able to be anwhere within a certain range. It should not take 4 years to cross a vast ocean. Ships should be able to use some of their movement to evade detection
(changing course to throw off pursuit).
The system I'm most fond of is WiF (World in Flames, WWII war game). It is an abstract system, but works well for representing how navies work, which current CIV/SMAC/X does not.

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by Senethro
Now thats really getting complicated (re: tunnels). I think that bridges as a sort of road you build on water would get all the worthwhile effects of tunnels.

Looking at the "Chunnel" why I think this is realistic for a SMAC2. I think bridges are also a must, and I'd personally like to see minefields (both land and aquatic).

I also want an enhanced AI to play against. Having AI units march up to my cities doorsteps and then, instead of attacking my cities, they destroy enhancements (which then usually leave them in a significantly worse defensive position), is less than enthralling.....


From a CMN's perspective why I'd like the ability to completely imprint the alpha(x).txt file onto the game. Thus if players in a particular game want to re-arrange where various SP's fall, then it becomes relatively easy for a CMN to do this, as well as any other changes the players would want.


From a Creators perspective, why I'd want the ability to imprint files such as the script.txt file, interlude(x).txt, and other files of this nature so that if I wanted to offer a different version of Planet in a Scenario, it would all be encapsulated in one file.


D

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Senethro
I've never played with simultaneous turns. How do they work in combat situations?

Everybody moves, then combat(s) occur(s). If you have played Diplomacy before, it's just like that.

I think simultaneous movement should also be an option for single player games. It makes the game entirely different.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Adagio
1) Make the graphics less disgusting. The colors for the game are just awful

No way, the colours are great for an alien setting. I kinda like the icons for various advacements, too.

Originally posted by Adagio
2) Remove the workshop

The workshop is one of the best things of the game (the other is SE).

Silly bADGer

[Sikander]

The Civ model of game is effectively obsolete. It's had a tremendous run, but the same shortcomings that have plagued it since Civ 1 are dooming it to a smaller and smaller market share as people like me get tired of the same stupidity. What was forgivable in 1991 is unforgivable today.

Many of the problems have to do with the overuse of the map for far too many functions. This leads to a lot of annoying anomolies like military units that can only move a few hundred miles a year in the modern age, or the fact that despite miraculous advances in transportation and improvements in infrastructure the workable radius of a city remains fixed for all of history, or the fact that a phalanx built in a city of 10,000 people costs the same to maintain and has the same ZOC radius as a mechanized unit built in a megalopolis, and has 1/3 of the movement to boot.

Another problem is as Chaos Theory and Urban Ranger so rightly point out is the turn sequence, where turns that take minimally a year are carried out so that one player can move all of his units and make all of his attacks before the other player can react in any way. This itself feeds back into a number of other issues (eg one of the main reasons that movement allowances are so tiny is to blunt the enormous offensive advantage that the current system provides).

I propose two simple changes to remedy these basic design flaws.

1) Turns must be simultaneous. Aside from the obvious advantage of speeding multiplayer games by a factor equal to the number of players this will also yield some other advantages as it will require a substantial reworking of the game system. For instance I envision a system where you build armies, fleets and air divisions as opposed to seperate units comprised of a certain type of troop. How many task forces are comprised solely of cruisers for instance, or how many armies solely of artillery? As the grand strategic commander you marshall the economy to provide you with components which you build into units (more cavalry / armor for operations in the plains etc.) which you assign commanders provided by your military education system.

These units are given general orders (one can't really envision a Gary Grigsby style system where every units movements are choreographed in advance at an enormous cost in time per turn) in a system that is more flexible and complicated than diplomacy's while retaining enough simplicity that the AI would stand a chance and play would proceed at a decent pace. For instance submarine fleets might be given interdiction missions, long range aircraft maritime patrol missions, strike aircraft detailed bombing missions or missions which allow them to select targets of opportunity. At the end of the day the final word goes to the tactical commander (ie the AI) which will offer a great leveler for any AI states / faction while at the same time increasing the realism of the action.

Secondly the game must be scalable. By this I mean that movement rates, city radii, populations, weapons & unit areas of effect must increase with technology and infrastructure. Early cities / bases might only be able to harvest resources and build facilities on a single tile in the early phases of the game. Later on a city migh be able to work adjacent tiles which contain roads provided that a requisite transportation tech level has been reached, and still later rails / mag tubes would allow an even greater amount of sprawl. More thought will have to be given to facilities, with some facilities providing benefits that only effect one tile (more could be built of course so that for instance your entire city gains the benefits of water or sewage systems). In this sort of system some cities will be subsumed into others (take a look at New York city for instance) and they would still retain a lot of their infrastructure.

A lot of other changes could be made. Civ was far from state of the art game design when it first came out, and those of us who were used to better looked the other way because it offered a 24 hour a day psuedo multiplayer game and took care of all of the book keeping. It's been over a decade now though, and it's time for TBS computer games to adopt at least 1970s board / simulation / role playing game methods.

[Jetmech]

One easy addition I would like to see is a defense bonus for your troops with weapons and a combat bonus for your troops with armor.

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Chaos Theory
How can 160000 engineers possibly be content without so much as a rec commons?!

Because they don't need an overpriced government-supplied facility to play computer games.

I'd be interested in an overhauled inefficiency model, as it doesn't seem quite right that my base 32 tiles from my HQ but connected with mag tubes in the post-orbital game loses half its energy even if I have a paradigm economy.

It doesn't lose half its energy. That city just withholds half their nonindustrial services for their own local purposes instead of the goals of the buggers in the capital.

[Mead]

Originally posted by Senethro


Ummmm. No heavy lifting?

I think the problem of all specialist bases can be laid at the feet of Mr Supply Crawler.
Should they be subjected to inefficiency? Should they have limits per base? Would these limits be equal to your pop or some deviant combination of your SE effic/industry/support?

Kind of like limiting the benefits of sattelites? One crawler per pop? Or something like that?

Sounds realistic.


Mead

[Fosse]

My big thing:
NO FORCED DIPLOMACY

What I mean by that is that things like Vendettas and sanctions should be chosen by the player, not forced upon them. If Morgan is my ally and he decides to nerve gas the Spartans, who are crashing down my doors then I should have the option to not honor the sanctions and keep trading with him.

So someone commits an atrocity, and you get a dialoge box: Do nothing, issue a rebuke, enforce sanctions (per Charter) for 10 turns, vendetta.

You choose, then you see everyone else's choices. If you don't go along with the Charter then everyone gets the option to impose sanctions or send rebukes to you. Two simple steps to a deeper diplomacy replace the one step of being issued a box telling you that you just cut off your biggest trading partner because the Charter - which you voted to repeal - told you to.

[Fosse]

Also, Social Engineering should interact with diplomacy a little more. Right now the AI loves you if you run its settings and hates you if you don't. This is fine enough in its own right, but agonizingly inflexible. Plus, it leads to some silly situations in multiplayer where arch enemy factions can get along just fine (sure, multiplayer should be more flexible, but it looses something).

So... Hook the commerce, social engineering, happiness and diplomacy models together.

First, make the scales bigger. Do the old 10x on the SE table, so a Pop boom is at +60 growth, etc.

Then, add and subtract small increments to various SE settings based on what other factions are doing. If you are Free Market then you get a +1 Efficiency for every other Free Market in the game, and a +2 Commerce for every Free Market you are trading with. Now you have a real reason to want to see other factions convert to a free market, so the AI's behavior makes more sense (why should Morgan care if some faction he's at truce with on the other side of Planet runs Green?).

Knowledge, +2 for Research for every other faction running it, and -2 Police for everyone running Fundamentalism.

Green, -3 Police and -2 Planet for every Free Market on Planet.

And more faction attributes that force player and AI action that makes sense, game-wise. Maybe Pacifist drones for the PK player when every other faction on Planet is warring (even if PK isn't).

Factions would still want SE choices that mesh with their innate abilities, and the Preferecnes and aversions would stem from that. Multiplayer games can still see Morgan and Dee allying against everyone else, but there will be some real tension there.


For good measure you can throw in more choices... Civ IV is having a 5x5 "civics" table, as compared to SMAC's 4x4.



Other things:

Globe. Please Globe.

No freaky factions. The SMAX set was a little wacky compared to the superbly balanced SMAC Seven. And no aliens. Human kind and Worm kind, please.

I love the idea of limiting crawled resources to the base population. It's too easy to let the game be all about crawlers, and this is a nice and simple way to balance them more. Or maybe make it the number of working crawlers, so there's still some thought to which tiles to crawl and the good player will have four crawlers working mines instead of 4 working forests (where today's player has eight working those forests and mines and more being built).

Better interface for the Design Workshop.

Toning Pop Booms down a little bit. Just another decrease in food box is enough for my tastes... seems more balanced that way.

YES to PBEM servers, even if it isn't simultaneous turns (You start the game, get a message that you have a turn waiting, you play it and hit TURN, the game sends it to a server and alerts the next person. The game does NOT IMMEDIATLY EXIT after that.)

I'd kind of like to see air and sea units throughout the game... It honestly makes no sense to rediscover the wing after flying across the galaxy. There would be all sorts of options to keep it balanced, but this post is long enough for tonight.